I wanted to do a quick project tonight that would help me dive into learning more about SE Expressions and implementing them into a material.
I decided to check out this tutorial which gives a great introduction to what makes up a shader/bxdf.
when they talked about Facing ratios i got the idea that using it could be a fun simple way to create a ghost shader.
my shader starts out with the first steps shown in the second lesson in the above mentioned tutorial. This creates the two color blend where you can change the falloff of a Fresnel-like screen facing gradient.
From there I multiplied a couple different factory procedural noises-which i later keyframed to create the animated texture in the final render.
at the end i created another se expression that grabbed the pobj information so that I could use the blue channel as a z-depth of the character. i added smoothstep to it to soften the effect and stretch out the gradient. I used it to lighten the front of the character which gave it a nice bit of depth to highlight his face and front arms.
then a bit of worley multiplied on top in the end to create some little crack like deterioration to the material.
With that I was able to render it out very quickly because it's just a simple pxrconstant shader.
From there the rest is compositing magic. I knew that with the ramp it'd be easy to create a ghost look by having the white edges and dark interior of the character. i could simply layer it onto any background as a screen layer to get the see-through feel. adding glow and lightrays would help give the ethereal glow.
The eyes were the same diffuse texture i used in the original project- altered with a colorcorrect and inverted to isolate the pupils and turn them white- plugged into a pxrconstant.
the background was a quick photobashed matte painting i made.
I still have a lot to learn but it was a fun intro in se expressions!
Raw Ghost Render
ColorCorrect up the Gamma
Add Glow in composite
